Financial, Government & Corporate Corruption & Cronyism

Commentary on: The People .vs. Goldman Sachs

They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

Of course they did. Then again, remember this?

Was Bernanke held to account for lying to Congress? Of course not. So why should Goldman fear doing it?

Defenders of Goldman have been quick to insist that while the bank may have had a few ethical slips here and there, its only real offense was being too good at making money. We now know, unequivocally, that this is bullshit. Goldman isn’t a pudgy housewife who broke her diet with a few Nilla Wafers between meals — it’s an advanced-stage, 1,100-pound medical emergency who hasn’t left his apartment in six years, and is found by paramedics buried up to his eyes in cupcake wrappers and pizza boxes. If the evidence in the Levin report is ignored, then Goldman will have achieved a kind of corrupt-enterprise nirvana. Caught, but still free: above the law.

This is new…..how? When? Has it ever been new?

Let’s look back to Continental Illinois. Did anyone go to prison? Well, there were a few people who were investigated and looked at, but……

Then there’s the 2000s. What’d we get – a handful (literally) of executives prosecuted? How many thousands of bogus companies were brought to market? How many people lost everything “investing” in a pig in a poke – a pig sold them by the very same banks that pulled this crap this time around?

To recap: Goldman, to get $1.2 billion in crap off its books, dumps a huge lot of deadly mortgages on its clients, lies about where that crap came from and claims it believes in the product even as it’s betting $2 billion against it. When its victims try to run out of the burning house, Goldman stands in the doorway, blasts them all with gasoline before they can escape, and then has the balls to send a bill overcharging its victims for the pleasure of getting fried.

Now Matt, that’s not quite accurate. It appears that Goldman also billed the clients that got fried for the gas at five times the market price!

Read the rest folks, then go pray.

If we can’t see these guys prosecuted now, before the Statute of Limitations runs (which, incidentally, is exactly what they’re hoping for) then you may as well put a fork in this nation and our ability to actually attract honest capital, from here or elsewhere.